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Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Using Packer with Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure [feedly]

Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images, that is static units containing pre-configured operating systems and application software. With Microsoft open technologies latest contributions to the project you can now use Packer to create machine images for Azure and Hyper-V using any computer with Hyper-V enabled.

Pre-baked machine images configured by tools such as Chef and Puppet, have many advantages, but they can be difficult to build. Packer closes this gap by providing a single tool to build across multiple environments. Packer is easy to use and automates the creation of any type of machine image. It is an excellent partner for modern configuration management systems, allowing you to use them to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Our contribution provides:

Azure Builder

Hyper-V Builder

azure-custom-script-extension Provisioner

PowerShell Provisioner

azureVmCustomScriptExtension Communicator

PowerShell Communicator

Our code has been complete and usable for a while; in fact we issued a pull request back in November last year. Unfortunately, because our code targets Go 1.3 while Packer currently targets Go 1.2 it has not yet been merged upstream. The good news is that the Packer team have confirmed that the next version of Packer will target either Go 1.3 or 1.4. It is therefore hoped that our code will be included upstream soon.

In the meantime, users can still use Packer to create machine images for Azure or Hyper-V by either checking out our Packer fork or by merging our pull request locally.